People often assume that fiction is a form of escape. And in many ways, it is. But for me, writing has never been about running away. It’s about reaching in.
The characters I create may live in entirely imagined worlds, but the emotions they carry are mine. Sometimes softened. Sometimes sharpened. Always real.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve kept journals. They’ve lived in bedside drawers, travel bags, tucked between books on a shelf. They weren’t meant for anyone else, just me. A quiet place to make sense of the world. I never really thought of myself as a writer, not in the public sense. But the idea of sharing my words. Of giving shape to the invisible experiences we all carry. It lived in the back of my mind, like a small light that never quite went out.
That light eventually became a book. Then more ideas. But before any plot took form, it was emotion that stirred first: Grief, hope, anxiety, longing. These feelings found their way into characters who overthink a text message, avoid mirrors, or feel both hyper-aware and completely unseen at the same time.
There are pieces of me in every story I write. And perhaps most visibly, there are pieces of me in Ava, the main character in Where We Came From. Her quiet strength, her desire to make things right, her ability to keep others grounded while privately unraveling, that’s me. Or at least, versions of me I’ve lived through. Ava’s journey through anxiety, marriage, and the slow revelation of a past she didn’t fully understand is fiction, yes. But we write what we know.
Sometimes it’s not even what I write, but what I don’t say out loud. The silences in dialogue. The unanswered questions. The way a chapter ends with a glance, not a resolution. That’s where real life slips in.
I write because I want people to feel heard—even if I never hear from them. I want someone sitting alone in their living room or waiting in a doctor’s office to read a line and think, “That’s exactly how I feel. I just didn’t know how to say it.”
Mental health exists on a spectrum. And often, we don’t recognize it in ourselves because it’s become our normal. The low hum of anxiety, the emotional fatigue, the coping patterns we call personality quirks. These are part of the human experience, not character flaws. And when stories name them gently, without judgment, we begin to see ourselves with more compassion.
The truth is, we’re all carrying something. And when I sit down to write, I let those truths rise, not to be solved, but to be witnessed.
So, if you’ve ever read a line in one of my stories and felt seen, even in a way that felt private or unspoken, know that I was writing between the lines of my own life, and maybe we just met in the margins.
“Mental health is a spectrum, and sometimes, our struggles hide in what we’ve learned to call normal.”
